Madre Ayahuasca called me to come to her. It had been four years since my last ceremony. I had always worked with her in Peru in very small groups, and this was to be a very large group and in Florida. I was a bit anxious. The ayahuasqero was a Peruvian from the jungle. He had a couple of assistants to help him hold energy and also a translator. The translator was a 30-something-year-old artist from Costa Rica named Alberto. He was unusual-looking, androgynous, and incredibly eloquent.

I was a bit disappointed in the ceremony itself. There were too many people for me to be able to relax. After the ceremony, I had to sleep dorm-style on a top bunk. I was annoying everyone around me with how many times I had to crawl down to get to the bathroom. It was not a pleasant experience.

The next night, back at home, I had a dream.
 
There was a little white mouse in a cage, all filled with bedding materials and wood shavings. It looked like it was stuck and couldn't move, just its little head was poking out. I reached in to help it free itself and when I did I found that the reason it was trapped was that it had an enormous tumor - many times the size of the mouse - which was buried under the debris in the bottom of the cage, which had the little mouse immobilized. I scooped my hands under the tumor to lift the mouse out.

Next thing I remember is putting the mouse in an aquarium-type container that had some sort of orangish-red colored sponge foam bits in it, though they seemed perhaps gelatinous as well as spongy. When I put the mouse in, and feeling quite satisfied to have freed it, I looked back to see that with the weight of the mouse and its tumor, it had sunk down underneath the spongy stuff and the mouse's head was underwater. He didn't look panicked or anything, he looked like maybe he was holding his breath, or perhaps trying to breathe in the water. I reached my hand in and lifted his head above water, for which he was grateful and started breathing again.

A little later I looked over and saw that the mouse's head had detached from his body and was floating around on top of the water, separate from his body and tumor. I covered my face with my hands and spun around saying "Oh no! How did that happen?", feeling like I had had some part in his demise. Next time I looked over at him, the mouse's head had regenerated a new body - he was alive and was tumor-free and perfect.

This dream was very vivid and I laid in bed going over it again and again to try to remember it and perhaps make out what it might mean.

I had not been intimate with a man in years and years, though I was starting to think that I might be ready to try it again. I had always wanted to delve into Tantric Sex and had spent the past year practicing it solo, getting to know my body again. I felt that I had reached a stage where I was healthy enough to dive deep into intimacy with a partner.

I always fantasized that I would know it was “him” by how he looked at me. When he looked at me he would see and make love to the Goddess through me – not me and my body – somehow less personal, but deeply intimate. This depth of intimacy would not scare him, he would embrace it.

Some movement at the foot of my bed caught my eye, and I realized that Alberto was standing there. He was looking at me just as I had fantasized, almost looking through me, deep within – and he saw The Goddess.

He crawled onto the bed and he began to make love to me. He started slowly kissing and touching me everywhere. He was looking deep into my eyes with great love in every moment. The feeling of ecstasy was exactly what I had been waiting for all those years! When he gently penetrated my body with his, suddenly branches shot forth from his fingertips – sprouting leaves, and roots started growing from his toes. Very quickly bark began to grow up, wrap around and eventually envelope his entire body, until all that I could see that remained of him were his two shiny, black eyes peering out at me from within the twisted vine. I then realized that I was being made love to by Madre Ayahuasca, by Nature herself, becoming one with God. She had come to me and taken a form that I could accept and recognize. It was so beautiful and deeply moving that it made me weep as I lay in my bed.

An experience that profound I felt must be shared. Surely Alberto had some knowledge of this as he had been used as a tool by Ayahuasca. I wrote to him the next morning. I wasn’t sure what to say as I barely knew him and had only had a couple of conversations with him the previous weekend.

I eluded to, but did not go into specific details of the sexual part of the experience. I told him that he had come to me in the night in a dream and that he had turned into an Ayahuasca vine until all I could see of him were his eyes shining at me through the spaces between the bark of the vine. I told him that it was so beautiful that it had made me cry.

I was not surprised at all by the generosity of his response. He said, “Your prose nourishes us both. And what a view it is from there….”
 
October 2010
Lisa McClendon Sims
Read at Cusco Writers Guild, August 2016